YSK that incognito mode, a VPN, and clearing your cookies do almost nothing to stop a website from recognizing your exact browser
I always figured private browsing plus a VPN made me more or less anonymous online. Not invisible, but close enough that no random website could pick me out of a crowd. Last week I got curious enough to actually test that assumption, and the short version is: it barely mattered.
I ran my browser through a handful of tracking checks covering stuff I never thought about: canvas and WebGL fingerprinting, which reads tiny rendering quirks unique to your GPU, the audio signature my hardware produces, whether WebRTC was leaking my real IP, which DNS resolver I was using, and a baseline fingerprint from my screen size and timezone. Also my full installed font list. 312 fonts, and that set alone was nearly enough to single me out.
Normal window first. Uniqueness score: 1 in 294,000. Then incognito, VPN on, ran everything again. 1 in 286,000. Incognito wiped my cookies and local storage, which is all it really changes about how the page sees you, but every hardware fingerprint came back identical. The VPN masked my exit IP, but WebRTC handed my real local address to the page anyway because I hadn't toggled the browser setting to block it. The canvas hash was the one that actually stopped me scrolling. Exact same string both runs, character for character. Incognito does not touch your GPU output.
I still use private browsing. It keeps your history off a shared laptop and that is genuinely what it was built for. It just was never meant to stop a site from recognizing your browser across visits, and I spent years assuming it handled both.
Why YSK: most people (well, me until eight days ago) don't realize that fingerprints let ad networks and data brokers stitch your activity across completely unrelated sites into one profile, no cookies needed. That profile survives clearing your data, switching to incognito, and changing your IP, because none of those alter what your hardware looks like to a webpage. Knowing which surfaces are actually exposed is the first step to deciding whether that tradeoff is worth acting on.